Ceredigion

Working with a slightly different standards regime in Wales to the one regulated by the Standards Board for England, Ceredigion County Council has found that the best way to get to grips with standards in Ceredigion has been to champion the issue across Wales.

“In Wales, we really have had to take a DIY approach to the Code of Conduct,” explains Ceredigion’s monitoring officer and head of legal services, Claire Jones. “It’s a new Code and there is no guidance at present in Wales. In England, obviously, one of the Standards Board for England’s major tasks is to train, and provide conferences. That isn’t provided in Wales so we’ve got together as monitoring officers and decided what we’d like to do is provide our own conference. We arranged a huge conference which was held at Aberystwyth University. We had some fantastic speakers and we were able to share good practice across Wales there.”

Claire goes on to explain that the conference also included a training exercise scenario devised in-house at Ceredigion. “That scenario’s been shared across monitoring offices in Wales and has been used by the chairman of the Adjudication Panel for Wales for his training sessions. So we try to share our good practice very widely – we’ve shared it with English authorities as well.”

Another success story has been the development of a Code of Conduct flowchart to help members understand their obligations in terms of personal and prejudicial interests. This has not only been very well-received, and subsequently rolled out to all six hundred community councillors in Ceredigion and monitoring officers across Wales, but its creation also proved a useful opportunity to work through potential Code issues.

“Right from the start, you really have to think about every single scenario that could crop up, so it’s been a good training exercise for ourselves in drafting it,” Claire explains.

The flowchart is just one of the training materials that Ceredigion provides to members. The authority also issues a ‘standards pack’ to all new councillors on election night, including information and guidance on the Code and a copy of the year’s standards training schedule. This is followed up with engaging training sessions using interactive scenarios devised in-house, as well as DVDs provided by the Standards Board.

“Also,” Claire says, “the public know that we’ve been providing this training, and I think there’s a realisation that councillors are doing their best, that they are getting guidance. Members of the public do see that we are doing our very best and in fact, we’ve had letters which are incredibly complimentary about the work of the standards committee. That’s really heartening and makes us feel as if we’re doing a good job.

“The key outcomes [of our work], hopefully, will be that complaints will remain at a very low level, as indeed they have over a number of years now. And if people are fairly confident that our standards are high, we will get more people willing to come forward to stand for election, or even just to get involved in the democratic process.”

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